Peter Isakovic: 0:00

If you behave this way and do this work, and the neighborhood sees you when it comes time to give news, especially bad news, guys, we need a $1 special assessment, and we're going to ask the homeowners to pay for half the bill, and the HOA will pay for the other half, like we did for the roof, you're going to get passed with 95% because you, they trust you because you're trustworthy because they see you doing the work, and then you could leverage that trust into making a decision that's not only in the best interest of the business and the building, but is also the right decision to make with homeowner support, which is which is a big one.

Announcer: 0:37

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Robert Nordlund: 0:52

Welcome back to HOA Insights: Common Sense for Common Areas. I'm Robert Nordlund, and I'm here today for Episode 164 with a special board member guest Peter Isakovic. Peter's a homeowner and a board member in Colorado. He serves on the board of the CAI Rocky Mountain Chapter, and he came to my attention because of an article he recently wrote for their news magazine there at CAI Rocky Mountain Chapter. The

topic was: 1:16

"Are "Preferred" Contractors Preferred?". It was a cautionary article on the importance of checking that your primary service providers are continuing to serve in the best interest of your association and are not abusing the relationship by overcharging or under serving. That resonated with me, because one of the first things I did as president of my association back in 1982 was to ask for significant reductions in cost from our management company, pool service provider, and garbage pickup service, because all three were significantly overcharging. They'd been taking advantage of the prior board. Now I hope this is not the case with your association, but we want to share Peter's experience in this matter to make sure you don't have blind spots at your association that are costing you money. Well, if you're a new listener, we're here weekly with episodes to help you with the hard work of being a board member. Last week, for example, was episode 163 with regular co-host Kevin Davis on more tips how to successfully work with insurance at your association. If you missed it, you can catch prior episodes on our website, on any major podcast platform, or on our YouTube channel. And if you like the show, by all means subscribe and join us in our mission to improve board member leadership all across the country, one episode and one association at a time. Well, those of you watching on YouTube can see the HOA Insights mug that I have here that I got from our merch store, which you can browse through from our HOA insights.org website, or the link in our show notes. In addition to some of the merch we have for sale, we have some great free stuff there, like board member Zoom backgrounds, that you can download for your next online meeting. Well, we enjoy hearing from you, responding to the issues you're facing at your association. So, if you have a hot topic, a crazy story, or a question you'd like us to address, you can contact us at 805-203-3130 or email us at podcast at HOA insights.org Today's episode was on me, as I said a moment ago. The I resonated with the message that Peter shared in his article, and wanted to have him on the show to tell his story. So, Peter, welcome to the program.

Peter Isakovic: 3:41

Thank you. Thanks for having me, Robert.

Robert Nordlund: 3:44

Well, let's start off with what got you on the board of CAI Rocky Mountain Chapter. In addition to being board member at your own association,

Peter Isakovic: 3:51

the way I got on the board, you know, I first moved into my building as a renter. I was a renter for eight years before I ended up buying first the unit next to me, and then buying the unit inside, or that I'm in right now. Over the years, I made friends with people in the building, made friends with the board members, and so when I became an owner, and I became eligible to run for the board, I had slightly more interest in being involved with the board than the rest of the community, which, as it is in many communities, had no interest in being involved on the board. I was asked to join almost as a fill-in, I think. You know, I was friends with the board members. There was a spot open. I had an interest in the board. I have, you know, a background running businesses. I knew what was going on with the building, and, you know, I wanted to lend a hand, be involved. I had no idea what I was getting into. I had no idea the storm that the building was was about to go in. It's definitely more than I signed up for. And then, with, with CA, I, you know, as we might talk about in this, in this podcast, after I succeeded in accomplishing a lot of good for the building and turning this building or. Around, I mean, our building was facing bankruptcy, imminent special assessments. We owed money all over town. We had massive deferred maintenance problems. Today, we don't have any deferred maintenance. We're fully funded reserves. We haven't had to raise dues. We got 400 grand in the bank, which, and we have zero deferred maintenance. It was a pretty massive turnaround, and sort of on the high of that turnaround, I saw I found out I learned about the CAI organization, and I asked to run for the board, and they didn't even acknowledge my application. They're like, you know, who are you? You're a homeowner, you're not a vendor, you're not a platinum sponsor, but they did invite me to join the home ownership, the home owner leadership committee, and I guess they really liked what I had to say. So I'm now Vice President of the board again in a somewhat unique position, because I'm one of the only board members that you know doesn't cost me any business speaking my mind and sharing my story. I don't have any vested interest at all in anything industry related. I just want homeowners to learn, you know, what I did, the pitfalls we found, and hopefully run their organizations and their businesses really better.

Robert Nordlund: 6:21

That's interesting, because, like, you say, so much of CAI is run by managers and attorneys and reserve day providers and landscapers and elevator service providers, all these people who are charging associations, and now you're a voice that you're just a homeowner on the other side, you're the one hiring all these services, and you have a fundamentally different viewpoint. Being on the other side of the desk,

Peter Isakovic: 6:49

it's a unique perspective, and you know that's something I noticed. We'd go, you know, you start going to these CAI events, and you see all these providers, and you see all these property managers, and I'm like, where's the customer, you know, where, where's, where's the board member that actually needs to be talking to these people on the front line, and why is there such poor attendance, frankly, from the homeowners? Like, do they do they not know about the organization? Is it apathy? Do they not have time? Do they not care? Is it a combination of all that, and then you start calculating what the financial damage of that is, and what the consequences could be, just based on what I saw, you know, and you start doing a, you know, similar triangles of, like, geez, like, what happens if this scales out over, I mean, I think we have 385,000 HOAs across the country,

Robert Nordlund: 7:43

right?

Peter Isakovic: 7:45

I mean, the total sum of poor decision making is a staggering number, and, and certainly an area for an opportunity for vast improvement. That's what I'm excited about, and you know, the, you know, the training, the education is part of it, but really getting, getting the in front of these vendors, the good guys and the bad actors, right? Like, there's there's some contractors are better than others, some managers are better than others. So, having an opportunity to be in the room with them and to talk to them and interact, it just enables the board to make, you know, a better decision, and geez, from what I've seen, there's certainly an opportunity for a lot more better decision make.

Robert Nordlund: 8:27

There's two ways I look at it. One is that this entire industry is built on the strong backs of volunteer board members. Everything is based on the presumption that the volunteer board members are going to run a multi million dollar not-for-profit real estate entity successfully, and you got onto the board, and you realized that they hadn't been doing that. You talked about the association being out of money, a lot of bad things going on, problems everywhere you look, and it takes leadership, and it takes wise decisions to turn that around to write the ship, balance the books, all those kinds of things, and then we have a trade organization, CAI, and CAI is, I want to say, as good as it can be at doing what it does, is interestingly unique in that it has providers of services and the receivers, the providers, and the purchasers of services in the same organization. When you think about the American Medical Association, American Bar Association, those are all about the doctors and the attorneys. They don't have patients at their conferences saying that doctor had poor bedside manner or that attorney just didn't care about my case, those kinds of things, and in CAI we are, we have that interesting balance of the service providers, the managers, the attorneys, all that kind of thing, and the homeowners, and so I'm glad that you're there reminding everyone that there's two sides to. This equation,

Peter Isakovic: 10:00

being able to go to these, or to these events, and peek behind the curtain, and kind of see, you know, because there is a trade organization. The job of a trade organization isn't to vet its members, you know, you've got, you've got bad people that join country clubs, right? And by going to that country club, you meet them, and you can, you have the power to make the choice to not work with them. Boards have a lot of power, actually. You know, we have the ability to fire people that we don't want to work with, and to hire people that we do want to work with. You know, people forget that. You know, everyone gets all crazy and excited, and, like, you know, we can sue. We can see, you don't have to sue, you just need to fire them and go on with somebody that's going to do provide better and learn from it and share it, and you know, over time the bar is raised and the bad actors will on their own leave because it's not profitable anymore, because the cat's out of the bag, and I'll tell you, a smart customer is a difficult customer, an informed client, you know, a board member that, because it's unrealistic to think that a board member is going to be an expert in running a building, right? Like, these are all, no matter how good the board is, with very, very exception, nobody really knows how to run the building, nobody has experience in it, you're dealing with, with, with a very broad set of systems of mechanical systems of things that you're not familiar with, like everybody knows what a gallon of gas costs, like, how much, right? Just 20 bucks of gas, right? Like, you know, if you're driving a cheap truck in Indiana, it's 85 bucks, if you're driving a Mercedes in LA, it's 150 bucks. Everybody knows what gas costs, but how much does 20 gallons of glycol cost? You know, and so now you have to make these decisions, and these are sometimes six figure decisions, seven figure decisions that are being made, and you're relying on people that, in theory, you know, on paper, the model of the HOA is great. You know, you've got this board, which is governing body that represents all the interests of the homeowners that hire this property manager that is gonna, you know, offer them scale and introductions to vendors that they work with, that are reputable, that are vended, and that the vendors are looking out, you know, but really the only, the only fiduciary responsibility falls on that board, and you know, maybe the people that you're surrounding yourself with, even the ones that have the best intentions, maybe don't aren't the best choice.

Robert Nordlund: 12:25

I hear a little weariness in your voice there.

Peter Isakovic: 12:27

I do have to play golf with these people, so like you know, and I don't want to say anything, you know, accusatory. I'm just saying, like, if you do your homework, you know, if you're walking through a bad neighborhood with your wallet in your front pocket, you're not going to get pick pocketed, that's what I'm saying. And so there's, there's many, many ways. In that article, what I was trying to point out is these are just some of the ways that you could protect yourself, that you could brace yourself, things to look for, things that you know, even with our experiences and our board, which you know is, is I'd like to say we're at least relatively intelligent man, we got, we got broadsided by a lot of things, which we discovered, and so that's what I tried to underscore

Robert Nordlund: 13:10

for the prior board, was it not that they were bad people, had they just presumed that everything was okay and just were coasting along with, did they have just blind spots everywhere? We

Peter Isakovic: 13:25

had, we had a relationship with a management company that started to turn, and that was what happens, you know. We noticed, you know, seven years before I got involved in this, seven years earlier, things were great, but then there started there were behaviors within the management company that the board didn't catch that were ironically presented to us that we in some ways approved in the contracts that we signed and the budgets that we ratified in the in the emails that we sent me like sounds good do it we basically approved and agreed to all the bad behavior, which was presented to us in a way that was murky and difficult to see and not intuitive, and so I put some of the blame, certainly on on a change in, if we had known what this, how this operation was working, we would have immediately gone to a different management company, but we know that that was something that we didn't discover until, you know, the things happened that made me roll up my sleeves and start digging, and, and really it came down to, you know, kind of like bouncing around the story here a little bit, but you know, we had to, me and another homeowner who isn't on the board, we reverse engineered our cash flow statements off of our bank statements off of our check registers, and we manually entered 24 I think, 2497 checks, typing vendor, and then what were, and the amount, and by reverse engineering. Our financials off of the check register, we were able to discover that the management company was using 54 cost centers to take little bits of money from us, and because the amounts of the money were less than $1,500 we had agreed as a board that anything less than 1500 the management company had approved pay. Yeah, right. So we would do, we would find ourselves in this situation where, like, let's say the plumbing, we approve the budget of plumbing for 8200 bucks. Okay, 8200 bucks plumbing. Well, now we got to do sewer. Well, of course we have to do sewer, and surprise, that's not in the budget. Let's approve it. Okay, well, now we got to do pipe jetting. Well, now we have to do pipe scaling. Well, now we have emergency, so all of a sudden we had seven eight plumbing things. My attorney called the death by paper cuts, but the, but the crazy thing is, and that's why I point out in that article that I write, the importance of your contract is that the contract we had with this management company basically absolved them of any wrongdoing from that, you know, we approved it. You can't sue somebody for doing a bad job if you hire them and approve the bad job that they're doing.

Robert Nordlund: 16:10

You hired them to do that, you said go ahead and do

Peter Isakovic: 16:13

it. You know, if you hire a Subaru mechanic to do, you know, heart surgery and you die, it's kind of on you. And that was a huge lesson that that we learned, a really important lesson for Boris to learn, you know, the language of that contract is everything, you know, and so there were there were layers and layers on this, I mean, the the the HVAC mechanical company was the most egregious vendor in some ways, what they were doing, and I've got example after example, but you know, when you know my role is taking over as president of the building, it happened. We, so somebody broke our front door,

Robert Nordlund: 16:52

okay? And

Peter Isakovic: 16:53

our management company comes in and says it's going to cost $28,000 to fix your front door.

Robert Nordlund: 16:58

Ouch,

Peter Isakovic: 16:59

yeah, and I'm like, that number is nuts, right? Let me, let me look into this and start doing some diligence. This number is crazy. No, no, we've used them for years. It's going to be a good door. Okay. Well, I've got a commercial real estate background. I've done my fair, my fair share of 10 improvement builds. I know what a front door

costs: 17:16

11 grand, 14 grand, 9500 If you know a guy, it's never$20,000 so that was

Robert Nordlund: 17:25

10 grand range,

Peter Isakovic: 17:27

yeah, 10-ish, right. And so this number really stuck out. So I started to dig deep, and I was, and by this point we had realized, we're like, wait a minute, what do you mean we're out of money? Two years ago, when I joined the board, we had 200 grand, and neighbor walked in while I was messing with the door, and she's like, you know, hey, you know, you're working on the door, that's great. I love that you guys are doing all this stuff in the building. You know, maybe we can put a tiki bar on the roof of the building, and like some tiki trees and torches, and I'm like, tiki bar, like we're definitely not going to do a tiki bar, we're going to be lucky if we get out of this without getting a special assessment. And I said that, and I said that because I was being honest. Oh my god, that spread like wildfire through the building, and you know, the board members that were trying to sell, the homeowner who was friends with the board member that had just, you know, grifted 52 grand from the board, because

Robert Nordlund: 18:18

he was,

Peter Isakovic: 18:19

yeah, he was the contractor that was doing these partitions and improvements in the building, like, what do you mean? Like, who's this guy? How's he involved? Anyway, they.. I was told that I was going to get a cease and desist for running my mouth, and you know, spreading rumors that we have a special assessment. Meanwhile, we are broke, and we have one boiler of two boilers down, and we have a leaking roof, like we're gonna..

Robert Nordlund: 18:45

it's not a good way in Colorado to face the winter.

Peter Isakovic: 18:48

No, no. And, and, and also, like, you know, I'm gonna be honest with my, with my neighbors, and I was concerned, you know, this is my investment, this is my money. I own two units in here, you know, every time these Muppets make a decision that costs $1 cost me four, so you know I was also looking after my investment. In fact, that was a platform that I ran on, like I'm not doing this because I love my neighbor, I love my investment, run this business as best as it could be run. So that's that's what made me, and when they threatened me with the cease and desist for running my mouth, you know, I talked to my attorney, and he said, uh, you know, I asked him, what do I do? It scared me, and he goes, well, you know, most people listen to it, some people take out full page ads, some people, you know, build web pages, and so I was like, well, wait, can I take this cease and desist and blow it up and post it to my hallway door, so every realtor that walks by can see it. He's like, 'You could. So then I, then I started playing offense, and I went back to my board, and I go, 'Give me that cease and desist, because we have problems here, and we're going to disclose them, and we're going to be straight with our neighbors, and I never got the cease and desist, but me taking that position now. The neighbors notice me, and they're like, "You know, who's this Pete guy? Who's this guy on the board? And then they tried to do a 20% dues increase, and I rally the building behind me to overcome that dues increase, because, as you know, the in the bylaws, your vote is yes unless you show up and say no. Okay, and as remarkable as the evidence that I had was, and the proof that I had was that we needed to focus on cutting costs rather than raising dues, like before we paid the band more money. Let's stop the Titanic from shit from sinking, you know. This is what would you believe that with all the proxies that I had, and all the support that I had, 50.3% point 3% is how much vote I was able to secure with my passionate evidence-backed narrative, that's why I was able, so barely, but we were able to overcome this dues increase, which then opened up the conversation to dig deeper, and you know, and at that point I rolled up my sleeves, I'm like, wait a minute, there's a chance I'm gonna get sued here. I better figure out what I'm talking about. And that's when I blew open and was like, it was, it was the door was the least of our problems. Looking back, if I could pay 28 grand for the door and have everything else be good, I would have paid 38 grand for the door. It was cataclysmic what was going on?

Robert Nordlund: 21:23

Yeah, well, Peter take on a long.. yeah, let's on the checklist. Yeah, you said you wanted to run it like a business, and I think there's so many board members that don't appreciate that it is a business. You have income, you have expenses, they need to balance. I face so many associations that have done so many years of cost cutting that the only way to balance the budget is to indeed raise assessments, and you were in a different situation, or I'm not sure, actually, what the statistics are, but your primary problem was leaking money, and I was thinking death by 1000 razor cuts. You said something similar. Yeah, that's like paper, the 1000 paper cuts. Yeah, just that you're leaking money, and that's no way to do it. But tell the truth, just make sure that that I believe that the truth is a strong place to stand on, and you had to find that truth, and fortunately for your association, you had enough votes to be able to say, okay, hey, let's do this right. Anyway, I want to get to your list, and I see what time we are, so we're after actually go through your list somewhat kind of rapid fire, but at this point in time, let's take a quick break to hear from one of our generous sponsors. After which, we'll be back with more common sense for common areas.

Paige Daniels: 22:48

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Robert Nordlund: 23:19

And we're back. Well, we're here with Peter Isockevich, and fascinating board member for his association, board member for CAI Rock and Mountain Chapter. Peter, let's get to some of the things that you recommend boards do to make sure that the service providers are indeed doing a good job for the association. The first thing you had on your list was review past invoices.

Peter Isakovic: 23:43

Yeah, that's a big one. You know, as you start to investigate, you know how you're running your business, you got to look at, you know, what you've been doing, what you've been approving, what you've been paying. You know, you, a good place to look is, look at past invoices that you paid, look at, you know, the work that was done, get a second opinion, get a third opinion. If you suspect that you know a vendor is overcharging, you know, like you know the example you gave when you took over for Africa, yeah, during the Renaissance period, the night. Thank you. And you said, you know, trash removal, you know, you looked at it and you're like, wow, this number is four times more than what I was quoted when I said, what is the cost of trash removal? Doing things like that help keep the whole process honest, you know. Vendors will put down part numbers on work that was done. Google those part numbers. I remember when I had my heat pump worked on, and I got charged for our 32 or whatever the refrigerant was, for my heat pump, and I'm like this seems like a high number, so then I Google R 32 and it was a high number. He marked me up 10x for the R 32 and so I called him out on it. He gave me an answer that I didn't like, you know, that was the last time he came to my unit, and the last time he came to the building, so the a lot of a lot of the wrong. Doing is actually right there in your files already presented to the board, and I urge the board to, you know, start looking through there if they have any suspicions, you know.

Robert Nordlund: 25:12

I like that we talk on the podcast about the 4c of being a great board member. Once you got to care about your association, it starts with that you got to be curious, you had got to have courage, and your case, you've been talking about at the right time, you need to fire someone and let them go, and then communicate what's going on to the homeowner, so you're a team together, and I like that combination of being curious and having courage, and I'm not sure a lot of board members appreciate that they're going to be asked to do those kinds of things.

Peter Isakovic: 25:47

It helps so much too, like, if you, because, because your neighbors will see you, you know, they'll see you walking the building with different vendors, and they'll ask, you know, what are you doing, and you tell them transparently, this is what I'm doing, because I care about the property, and I, I'm curious to find out what the, what, what the, the actual pricing is, and to get to, like, if it costs$12,000 it costs $12,000 If it costs six, I want to know why they're charging us six. There might be a very reasonable value add to it. Maybe they've got better insurance and better workman's comp than these guys. Okay, we can factor that in. But one thing that the board needs to realize that if you behave this way and do this work and the neighborhood sees you when it comes time to give news, especially bad news, guys, we need a $1 special assessment, and we're going to ask the homeowners to pay for half the bill, and the HOA will pay for the other half, like we did for the roof, you're going to get passed with 95% because you, they trust you because you're trustworthy because they see you doing the work and then you could leverage that trust into making a decision that's not only in the best interest of the business and the building but is also the right decision to make with with homeowner support which is which is a big one you know you don't have to swim upstream as a board you just need your community to know that you're working in their best interest. That's why I've always been transparent, you know, arguably to the maybe, maybe sometimes to my detriment. Oh, it's like, God, I shouldn't have said that, or now this launched the 30 minute conversation, but it matters.

Robert Nordlund: 27:18

Yeah, and then you say, roll up your sleeves and be visible, being a gage client, have the homeowner see you walking around. You also said that sometimes a smart customer is a difficult customer because you're asking questions, and maybe that alert that the service provider hears or feels is that okay, I need to make sure I have good answers, good pricing, because ABC Villas is going to call me on it. If it's, if I say 28,000 and they say why not something in the $10,000 range, you need to be able to challenge that. Always use legitimate service providers and contractors. That almost sounds like that could be a little more expensive,

Peter Isakovic: 28:01

no matter what community you're living in, you know, you're not, you're not going to hire your wife's cousin's roommate to do a repair, right? You're gonna need to hire somebody that's, that's insured, first of all, and that's, by the way, a big one. Make sure your attorney looks at that insurance, make sure that they are insured for multifamily, make sure they're their company has deep enough pockets or deep enough reinsurance, so that if there is an issue, they don't have the ability to fold up in the middle of the night and leave town. We had that happen. We won a$300,000 judgment against the roofing company that literally changed our name, vanished, and then it turns out that the insurance that they had that they provided us wasn't approved for multifamily, and so we were right, we had this judgment, but there was nothing we could do about it. So that's like a lesson learned, and that's why I put that in high up in the article. Be like, first things first, make sure you're working with qualified people, and yeah, they're going to cost more, and that that is an okay up charge, you know. Hire someone with workman's comp.

Robert Nordlund: 29:01

Well, you said it earlier, if the $28,000 front door was the only thing, then it was money well spent, and you want to be able to spend money correctly at the right time, and just you're running a tight ship, and you want to make sure it's water tight, and sometimes water tight does cost a little bit extra money, but it means you're not leaking money, and that's that's the trouble. Talk to me about contracts, your contract versus their contract, that kind of thing.

Peter Isakovic: 29:27

When things go wrong, it comes down to the language in your contract. Doesn't matter what was said, what matters is what was signed. And the contract that vendors generally provide are going to be very friendly to that vendor. You need to have your attorney that works for you draft and prepare a contract that has teeth in it, in the event things go wrong that protect you. For example, you know, change orders is a big place for contractors to make money. You know, when we were getting bids on our roof to do our roof, we got bids ranging from 85,000 1000 to 400,000 okay, and it's like, okay, wow, are you gold trusting the roof? Like, why? Why is it there? Why is it difference in price? And then you start looking at, well, you know, the amount of materials, what materials? And so the short answer is, you need a contractor that says, listen, this is a job that we're going to do, this is the amount of materials we're going to need to do this is going to be the type of materials we're going to do, the number of hours, the number of this right, and they're going to put that down and put it forward, and your contract needs to say, okay, we agree to this, and by the way, you can't come back now and say, you know what, we were wrong, it turns out you need three times as much tile, then that's why your bid now goes up from 80,000 to 170,000 no, no, if, if it turns out that you underestimated the amount of material that we need, that's not on you. And your attorney will have that language in the contract to protect you. Their contract will not, and it's a, it's a big one.

Robert Nordlund: 30:56

And I liked your last comment in the

article: 30:58

building your preferred suppliers who work for you, not the management company, and that'll give you continuity through the years through management transitions, people that are loyal to you, not just the management company.

Peter Isakovic: 31:10

Yeah, because things change, you know. Again, you're, you know, the board. The board is actually a really powerful entity. The board can, you know, fire, you know, management companies that they don't like that they don't think are doing a good job, and when that happens, all those preferred vendors go out the window, and the preferred vendor shouldn't be representing the management company anyway, should be representing your best interest, and the board should be hiring. Yeah, it's like you work for us, and so as a hands-on board, because of what happened to us, we are very front line with all of our vendors, in fact, in our management contracts, they had language that said, you know, we're going to do a 15 or 20% project management fee on project. We struck that out. I said, we don't want you involved, we're going to be involved with that, we're going to handle that, because you come into situations, and you know, to talk on that point, we've got a plumber, a vendor that came, and he jetted our pipes, and I think the cost was like 2800 bucks to jet our pipes. He wanted to get in. It was the first time in the building. His name's Mike. Great, we hired Mike about three months ago. We needed to get our pipes jetted again, so we reach out to Mike, and Mike's office comes back to us with a bid for 3500 bucks. So I Mike, and I go, "Hey, man, you to do the same job again. It's going to be easier this time, because you just did it a year ago. It's going to be even faster here. You kind of know the drill. You could send out a guy, can you do it for the price you did it a year and a half ago? And if you can, I'll prove it right now. And you said, "You know what? Yes, I'll do it for that. Great, we just saved 700 bucks, and we approved them. But then, about six weeks later, we had an after-hours emergency clock, and so I called Mike, and I go, 'Mike, it's Saturday night, 830 Sorry, we got an issue. There's water back filling into the laundry rooms of these ground floor units. Can you send somebody out? An hour later, a guy came out, did what he had to do, wrapped it up. He left by 1030 It was done, and we got a bill for 440 bucks, right? Because it was an after-hour recharge, a special trip. You know what, we paid it. We paid it, and we said, thank you. You know what, you earned that extra 200 300 bucks, for whatever. Well, I mean, you stuck a pipe, it was fixed, whatever. So you know, treat your vendors right. If they treat you right, you know, hold them where, where they're, where there's a reason to say, "Hey, man, let's, let's back up on this and be, be a little bit more competitive. And here's why: if they give you that, then you give them back when they get, when they go above and beyond, and they earn it, and now me and Mike have a great relationship, and he gets all of our plumbing business, plus other plumbing business that I refer him to. So, Mike wins, we win. We saved 800 bucks on the jetting. We were able to fix the clock after hours.

Robert Nordlund: 33:54

Yeah. No, I like that. I like the win-win relationships, and you can do that. You, you can do that, Peter. Fantastic, great conversation. It was fun having you on the program to share some of your lessons learned. It sounds like there was some bumpy times. You were the right guy at the right time for your association, and for everyone listening, I will have a link to Peter's CAI Rocky Mountain chapter article in the show notes. But any closing thoughts to add at this time,

Peter Isakovic: 34:21

you know, you touched on this before. The, this is this is your business, this is your money. This is supposed to matter. It needs to be treated with that respect. This is the, this is, this is like running a turnaround corporation, you know. And it should matter, and if you are on the board, you know, roll up your sleeves and do the homework, because you know, you know, I brag about how, like, we never had to raise dues in five years, that's that's a little misleading. What we did was we reduced the cash flow bleed by 70,000 a month. We were actually in a position where we could have reduced due. Use by 30% and we didn't, so effectively we kept dues flat, but really we kept all this money that we were able to funnel into reserves to build up reserves. So, oh,

Robert Nordlund: 35:11

your man, speaking my language here.

Peter Isakovic: 35:13

Yeah, I mean, like, like, like, care about your property, never mind the neighbors, take care of your money, and take care of your investment, and, and out of respect for running a business well, run the building well, and reach out. CAI is full of great resources, where you know you can meet people that are that are honest, that will be able to help, and you, you can meet some dishonest ones too. And you put them in the room, and you'll be like, "I'm gonna go with this guy, not this guy. You have the ability to do that and take advantage of it. It's right there in front of you.

Robert Nordlund: 35:41

I like that. Well, we certainly hope you learned some HOA insights from our discussion today with Peter, that helps you bring common sense to your common areas. We look forward to having you join us for another great episode next week.

Announcer: 35:59

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